


Overload

by Nicolefrickle



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Caretaking, Gunshot Wounds, Kink Exploration, Movie: Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Other, Pining, Robophilia, Robot Kink, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:54:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23327332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nicolefrickle/pseuds/Nicolefrickle
Summary: John learns how to live with his machine.Canon divergence from Terminator 2 where the T-1000 still dies but Sarah Connor does too, and the T-800 becomes John's protector indefinitely.
Relationships: John Connor/T-800 (Terminator), John Connor/The Terminator
Comments: 24
Kudos: 103





	Overload

He meets it for the first time in 1995, stomping towards him with a shotgun in its hand and its eyes hidden behind dark shades, and John's only thought is, _monster._

But then it ends up saving his life—and he doesn't know what to think anymore.

The way he sees it, it isn't really a monster because John knows what those look like and what they're supposed to be. These dark things, nameless things, hiding underneath his bed at night or right outside in plain sight, doing whatever lets them get close enough to touch him, kill him. Something even worse.

Skynet. The T-1000 wearing the face of his mother. Those are monsters.

A monster wouldn't have protected him. A monster wouldn't have kept him safe, or killed for him, or laid itself bare afterward for this kid who was still standing there crying out for his mommy, even when her face melted right off the T-1000 and onto the dirty floor. And a monster _e_ _specially_ wouldn't have done all that for John Connor, who's still young but knows enough about his name to realize that he's someone special—or at least he's supposed to be, one day.

So John's special, and he gets his own monster who isn't really a monster. It's his property, now. It listens to him. Protects him. It has its programs, its directives, but John gets to play with everything in-between that doesn't interfere with all that, and he spends a long time learning that balance. Learning how to live with it until eventually he understands enough about it to know that the Terminator can't hurt him—directly or indirectly—and it has to obey whatever he says. His own, very attack dog.

Then John is its master, technically, if he had any desire to think of it that way.

"You ever get bored of me?" John asks it one day, kicking at the dirt while he leans on their motorcycle. It's six months later, and the word _monster_ doesn't cross his mind when he looks at the Terminator, anymore. They've moved past that. It's efficient, and lethal, and sure, it's scary as hell when you're on the other side of John's orders, but he'd call it a bodyguard before anything else.

John would also be something of a hypocrite to call it a monster while he's wearing its leather jacket—swimming in it, really, so big that it weighs him down. It carries half a year's worth of old bloodstains, from all the people the Terminator hurt so that John wouldn't be.

Its voice mimics curiosity. "Bored of you?"

It does this little head quirk, too, something that always happens whenever John becomes too human for it. It knows what bored is, it isn't stupid. It just can't connect those wires to him and make it mean something practical.

"Yeah." John lifts his head up, swiping his hand through his bangs. "I'm the only person you talk to, I dunno, do you ever get sick of it?" He doesn't know what his plan is, asking it a question like this, too opinionated, too emotional. What the hell would John do if it replied yes? Start taking it for walks, to introducing it to people who don't know anything about anything—hey there, here's my bodyguard who's really a cybernetic killing machine, but don't worry: I told it to be on its best behavior.

What a joke, it all is.

The Terminator answers him, finally. "I cannot get sick, and John Connor is not boring."

Now John has to smile. At how it gives these simple answers but manages to catch him so off guard with them, anyway. It told him the plain, objective truth: John Connor isn't boring. In fact he's probably a little _too_ exciting, what with the size of the target on his back, and how the one who put him in danger and spun this whole fucked-up scenario in the first place was _himself;_ _is_ himself. However that works.

The Terminator has its job cut out for it, all right. He'd feel sorry for it, if there was anything to feel sorry for. And if he hadn't spent half a year with the thing, learning how it operates with these wide eyes, full of childlike wonder that John grew up too fast to still have any left of. But it never resisted him. It never gave John a reason to pause so he stopped looking for them, and instead busied his hands in the very thing that's supposed to make him so _special._ When one day John felt it necessary to understand it. His machine.

 _Not a monster,_ John thinks to himself, so sure about it that he'd fight anyone who tried to say otherwise.

He tells it, just sarcastic enough, "Thanks."

And then they keep moving. That's a necessity too, how they can't stay in one place because it's all so fragile; John's world is so fucking _fragile._ He knows it's inevitable that one day he'll get lax for a moment—barely long enough to blink—and that's when the metal hands will finally clamp around his neck. The T-1000 was just the beginning. Skynet will never stop, and John's only peace is the fact that his Terminator won't stop, either. It's like that old, philosophical question people always ask to no answer: what happens when an unstoppable force meets immovable object—only, the immovable object has a boy on the back of its motorcycle with his scrawny arms wrapped around its waist.

The Terminator is what it always is—cold, and solid, and constant. John can feel the parts underneath whirring against his hands. All this time and he still gets anxious, this twist in his guts from touching something so complex, futuristic and strange. He rubs his cheek into the inside collar of his leather jacket, and then presses his face against its broad back. They ride for a long time, just like that. John had told it to take them somewhere warmer, after asking it if it was bored of him.

It listens.

Warmer turns out to be somewhere down south. They cross a border but John doesn't see the state sign, he's dozing off and squeezing the Terminator's waist like he would a stuffed bear. It isn't soft like one. But John doesn't like soft, it's been programmed out of him just like every other nice thing he's lost. The motorcycle is a buzz in his ears by now, and the road bumps are nothing compared to what he's been through; they're soothing, almost. _Bump bump bump,_ he can stomach it. John laces his fingers together by its abdomen, and eventually he falls asleep against his machine.

He dreams. It's a bad one, but it isn't half as bad as his nightmares where his mother makes an appearance. In this one, John's at the end of a long, white hallway, staring at the other side, festering this all-encompassing dread that sinks down into his bones because he knows that something is going to round the corner. Something is going to come for him. He's alone when it does, and it's the amorphous blob of the T-1000 that had given up trying to look human anymore, only concerned with killing him. There's a pistol in John's hands when he looks down. But when he tries to use it his fingers seize up and all it shoots is roses—no bullets, no chance—and those liquid-metal hands clamp around his neck because he couldn't defend himself. Because he's human, and weak, and alone.

He wakes up to his name. "John."

The motorcycle isn't moving anymore. There aren't any bumps under him and no engine to buzz in his ears. The dream falls away slowly, devastatingly. John can feel the sweat all over his skin, the ache, the tightness in his muscles that only comes from thinking you're going to die, and waking up to remember that it's part of your reality, too. There's no escape from it.

John realizes that he's in its arms, then. The Terminator cradles him in one bicep, holding a guitar case in the other hand—home to a well-used shotgun—and it keeps him steady in its grip. It squeezes him tightly as it kicks in the door to some cheap motel now that John's awake.

He blinks when they're inside, because if he didn't know any better, it almost feels like it waited _._ Like the Terminator had _considered_ him, woke him up so he wouldn't be startled by the lock snapping, or the wood splintering, but god, that's something so insignificant. It isn't part of its directives. It shouldn't have done it. John has goosebumps as he tries to rationalize it, how in the world it decided to pick him up off the motorcycle seat like a father bringing their beloved son to bed. There's a pathway in its chip, somewhere. There has to be. Keep John alive—keep John healthy—let John sleep. The natural order of its protection.

He fists the fabric of its worn, loose shirt. He's still sweating from his dream, swimming in the fear it wrought from his memories, and how it was enough to make him sit here in its arms and question the only fucking thing he knows.

 _"C'mon_ , put me down," John says, pushing against its chest, now. He feels childish because of how easily it handles him. How it turns him into something small and young and in need, which wouldn't bother him so much if he wasn't already shaken.

The Terminator sets him down, and John's relieved that it doesn't do it gently. It's the kind of detached way that it does everything else, following the most efficient route from point A to point B, just like it's supposed to do. They're here right now because of that same efficiency. John's _alive_ because of it too, so he relies on it, on what he knows about it, and he doesn't ever want to feel the way he did when it cradled him.

He's not a kid, anyway. Just like the Terminator isn't his father or his monster.

It sits in the old armchair by the twin bed with a shotgun in its lap, loaded with shells. _Not roses,_ John thinks, but that goes without saying.

He can't sleep, now. That dream messed him up in more ways than one. It pulled him under, and he still doesn't know where they are, or how long they drove before he came-to. John flips himself on the bed and turns to face the door, the outside world beyond it. The only thing between him and oblivion is a machine that once-upon-a-time tried to kill his mother and stop John from ever existing at all.

The Terminator looks straight ahead, at the wall, and hasn't moved from its spot since they arrived. It didn't have a reason to.

John clutches the blanket to his throat. His bangs fall over his eyes, and he looks at the Terminator through the strands of his hair, and he knows that it'll never stop bothering him so he might as well ask.

"Why'd you carry me in?"

It rotates its neck slightly towards him. "Your temperature was 1.8 degrees higher than human basal metabolic-"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it- I had a fever." John feels a pinch of relief. "Do I have one now?"

There's a pause as it reassesses him. And he doesn't know why, but understanding what it's doing, that it's probably done it over and over without his knowledge since it'd first kicked in the door: looking at John, extracting everything it needs from it. It makes his cheeks warm. Which, shit, definitely shows up on its radar. That simple flash of heat.

"Negative," it replies.

John feels like a broken record. "Just say _no._ You can-" and then he laughs at it. At everything. "You can just say _no."_

"No," it listens. But John thinks he must've corrected the thing a thousand times already, and that somewhere inside it there's a virus that just really, truly wants to drive John crazy—one _negative_ and _affirmative_ at a time. Maybe that's been the plot against him all along. John shouldn't be worrying about another machine coming, but about what happens when his only company is the same stubborn Terminator that carries him like a baby when it detects a one-degree fever.

But John closes his eyes all the same and remembers how easily he'd fit there, in its arms, still wearing its over-sized jacket. He stays quiet for while, clutching at that very specific feeling.

He asks it while his eyes are still closed, "Where are we?" and it makes him even warmer, how he trusts the Terminator's brain—its process—enough that he's only just now wondering what bed he's in. It could've taken him anywhere.

"Riverbend motel, located in north-eastern Georgia."

John appreciates the lack of extra fluff in its answer.

"Georgia, huh," he remarks. It's no different than any other place they've rolled through, just one more pit stop on their journey with no end in sight, and no plan other than to stay alive long enough to save the world. Just the whole fuckin' world—no big deal, no pressure or anything. It isn't like they left him alone. He has a Terminator, who has a shotgun, and that shotgun shoots shells and not roses.

The natural order of things, again.

When John closes his eyes, he falls asleep, soundly. Doesn't end up dreaming that night.

Or for a lot of nights.

It's 1996, and John Connor celebrates his birthday in a country diner sitting across from his Terminator, who'd kept its sunglasses on, and leaned the guitar case against its chair. They're in that limbo between attacks. And things are even more complicated, because the last thing that'd come after John wasn't a machine but the government, who'd found his face on too many security cameras to feel good about calling it a coincidence. He's famous now. Sort of. But in that _bad_ way no one wants to be, which, really, is exactly why he's in this mess to begin with.

So fuck being famous.

And fuck hair dye, and haircuts, both of which are the only birthday presents he gets.

He also says it in front of the bathroom mirror, just to make sure the universe heard him right the first two times: "Fuck this."

The Terminator doesn't reply, but it looks at John in a way that means it understands—it sees the lines of frustration in his face, and detects how his voice raises higher. It knows the word _fuck_ too, but it never really caught on to all the ways you can use it, so John's the only one who does. There's an empty, boxed hair-dye on the ground and black stains all over his little hands, even more on the sink, and then even some on his shirt. Good enough, John thinks. It's a patchwork job but what isn't.

He looks at the Terminator in the mirror's reflection, and then turns his head to meet its eyes—its eyes behind the sunglasses. One intact, the other one hollowed-out and too machine to ever let anyone but John see it. It's bracing the door with its back so it won't open, because the lock's broken, because they're in a shitty gas station bathroom, because John's whole life is whatever scraps the world gives him.

His hair feels dry and chemical-brittle when he tussles it, and he looks back into the mirror again when he does. "Do I really have to cut it?"

"The probability of being recognized will be dramatically reduced if you do," it replies, big words, words John is too distracted to make any sense of. The Terminator must realize this too because it adds, sternly, "You really have to cut it."

"Fine," John sighs. He runs his hand through his overgrown bangs in goodbye, and blows them away from his face, after. It won't be so bad, just different. He can manage _different_ the same way he manages everything else: because he has to. Because it all falls apart if he can't.

The scissors are already in his hands when he suddenly pauses. And then John shifts on his feet, burning with an idea that sounds stupid even in his own head, but whatever, he says it out loud because a Terminator isn't going to judge him for it.

"Can you do it?" He wonders.

He hears it push itself off the door. Then there are a couple heavy-set footsteps before it's standing right behind him, chest humming by his ears, in his brain. When it lifts a hand, John fully expects for its skin to peel away to reveal metal rods and wires and tech—and then for all those parts to morph into a pair of scissors. So when the Terminator instead reaches out and takes John's, he doesn't know what to think. The fine, blonde hairs on the back of his neck raise up.

"Just don't go crazy, alright?" John tells it, breathing too hard. Breathing like he's in danger with it, which he knows he isn't, so why the hell are his lungs so tight?

"Go crazy?"

"Yeah, like-" John takes one, big breath to get his nerves back in order. "Like when you go overboard, take something too far."

It considers this, and then raises the hand with the scissors to promise him.

"I swear I won't go crazy."

John has to laugh at that—one full of air—and he thinks, _I have an inside joke with the Terminator._

It gives him his birthday present. The Terminator tips his head back with its empty hand—not carefully, but close enough—and John swears he can feel it everywhere even though it's only touching his scalp. Its palm presses on the side of it, firm, stiff, level. He lets it manipulate him. Whatever it needs to do. His jaw is clenched while it tests out the scissors with a few, exploratory snips in the air, and then it finds a patch on his head to cut.

The hair starts to fall. John does too, suddenly so dizzy under that lone, fluorescent light bulb above the mirror, but he catches himself before the Terminator has to. He feels like a kid for some reason. The way it touches him and guides him, full of knowledge, leaving this warm bundle in his stomach as he wonders why the hell he'd _wanted_ it to do this. To cut his hair for him. John could've gotten away with keeping a few extra inches if he did it himself, but the Terminator has no interest in what he wants, all it sees is liability, and it's following that pathway of least resistance, again. Keep John alive—keep John from being recognized—keep John from keeping his hair.

The Terminator rests the scissors against his nape, gliding along it and trimming. John holds his breath. The bathroom is more humid and uncomfortable than he remembers it being two minutes ago. He's sweating now, wiping the beads from his nose, trying not to lock his knees because someone once told him that's what makes people faint when they stand for too long. He could lean back and let the Terminator bear all his weight. But the thought of doing that is worse on his body than locking his knees would be.

"Looks stupid," he mutters to himself, because he has to let something out.

Its fingers brush through some knots while he shivers.

"John Connor is not stupid, and neither is his hair."

And what the fuck—it hits him like a brick along with everything else. The way it's holding him, grooming him; _complimenting_ him even though it falls flat in its voice and it never intends for them to be compliments. But they _are._ So his toes curl because the Terminator is holding the back of his neck while it compliments him, and that's the moment John realizes what it is, why he feels like he'd messed up. Did something wrong.

It never touches him.

He's the one that touches it.

All at once, John leans forward and waves his hand behind him. "Alright already, cut it out. You're gonna turn me bald." That's what he says, but the mirror tells him that his cheeks are pink, and his head tells him he's still thinking about how it touched him.

The Terminator looks at his reflection, only. "It's not symmetrical," it tells him.

John can't believe it felt the need to point it out.

"Neither are you," he says stubbornly. Then he turns around, because he's sick of looking at his ugly hair, and he's sick of being tracked, and he's sick of feeling like he doesn't know the Terminator or even himself, anymore.

The sink presses against his back, and the Terminator is still in front of him. John's mad at it—or at least he thinks he is. It's easy to be mad. There's a lot to be angry about, things aren't like they were in the beginning, when everything moved so fast that his mother was already dead before he could stop and process how fucked up it all was. And still is.

John could say, _at least we're together._ But there is no _we._ It isn't even a person, it's a robot that does whatever he says and whatever keeps him alive, because he's still that special kid. John Connor needs to breathe so the world doesn't stop, that's what its core directive tells it. Its heart. So the Terminator isn't supposed to do things like cradle him in its arms, and cut his hair, it just isn't. Because if it starts doing things like that—if John _lets_ it—then all of a sudden there's a _we._

John needs to prove there isn't one. It'll bother him on the road if he lets it go, and it'll feel even worse while he's strapped to the motorcycle, arms wrapped around its waist again, wind ripping at his jacket and his new, black, asymmetrical hair.

Proving it starts with an order.

"Put me on the sink."

The Terminator puts him on the sink. It doesn't ask why, and it only touches him for as long as it needs to, hands cupped around the sides of his scrawny chest. It lifts him up with ease. It has the strength to rip a car in half, so John is nothing to it.

He feels its grip through his ratty, blue t-shirt—didn't want to get dye on his favorite jacket.

"Lean down," he says. It does it, stiffly. "A little more. Alright, stop."

The Terminator's face is right in front of him, now. John breathes shallow like he doesn't want it to detect him—that little puff of air whenever he exhales—even though he knows it's already monitoring everything about him. He half-expects it to tell him he has a fever, again, with how hot his skin feels. How loud his blood roars in his heart. But it doesn't say anything. The Terminator's silent obedience is an open book and already proving his point, the one about it not being a person, about not becoming _we._

John needed this, to remind himself of what it is. A Terminator. It's in the _name,_ for Christ sakes, he shouldn't be so confused about it.

He figures that he just got too sentimental, before, that's all. No one's taken care of him in a long time. It'S John's birthday, after all, so fuck him for wishing for something more than a machine's dead-end company and a bad haircut with a bow on top.

It's a Terminator.

There is no _we._

John reaches up and takes its sunglasses by the rim, pulling them away and dropping them in the sink where they rattle against the ceramic. The Terminator doesn't react any more than focusing its eyes: dilating the human one, shuttering the robotic one. It takes John in, because it knows him, and he knows it. John spent months buried in its wires, teaching himself how it worked. Asking questions only when he couldn't puzzle through it himself.

 _"Does it hurt?"_ John had asked, the first time he'd touched its bare arm, its synthetic skin carefully peeled back to showcase its inner machine. He knew _hurt_ was the wrong word to use, but it's something so ingrained in human nature that he couldn't help but do it. Empathize.

 _"I'm aware of the damage,"_ it replied. Which almost made John sad, the way the thing said it.

John doesn't ask if it hurts, now, and he doesn't flinch at the sight of its injury. He's a big boy. He can take it. He's watched people take bullets because of him, and he's worn their blood on his sleeves while he sicced his shotgun-wielding attack dog on them, so this is child's play. The grit just keeps working its way through him; He's growing into his name, that's what it is, and one day maybe he'll feel like the John Connor who's worth all this trouble and misery.

The Terminator is still while John's hand moves up its strong cheekbone. He's tracing it. Learning how it is, feeling all the way up to its exposed eye. There's a grave around its right eyeball—hollowed-out by its injury. The pupil flashes red when his little fingers draw near.

John says, "Y'know, sometimes I wish..." but he doesn't know what he wishes for. And even if he did, there aren't any birthday candles to blow out, it's just the two of them. Here. Together.

"Wish?" the Terminator echoes him. At least, that's what it must be doing.

John feels something flutter in his stomach, then. He braces his left palm against its cheek while his right thumb hooks into the empty socket, pushing down on the inside. The Terminator still doesn't react to him. It might not know what he's doing—because fuck, even John doesn't—but it knows everything else, like how he isn't angry and how he isn't trying to hurt it. _Damage_ it. He just—he _needs_ this right now. Needs to feel the metal on the tip of his thumb.

The next minute lasts for years, and John spends that time hoisted on a dirty bathroom sink, digging around in machine parts. He's in its head, tracing the architecture that holds the Terminator together on the inside. It's all metal and micro-tech and re-purposed Skynet. It should feel so strange, but somewhere along the way it became a second home. All he's doing right now is relearning it.

John's lips fall open, and he's rubbing the edges where the metal caves in, and he still has so much of that childlike wonder that it'll get him killed, one day, surely.

The Terminator finally shows a sign of life. It tilts its head—not enough to even notice unless your fingers were already inside it. John strokes the back of its eyeball intently and watches how its pupil flickers. How it feels the intrusion, feels John. His cheeks are pink again while he waits for it to finally say something, and dreads it, too, because what the fuck could it say about this?

John rushes to speak first, because he doesn't want to know. "It's my birthday today."

He didn't tell it before, or last year, either. But all of a sudden John doesn't like the thought of no one else knowing about it, and he feels close to it like this. He feels like sharing.

"Happy Birthday," it tells him. Probably read it on a card in the gas station, or saw it in passing on a T.V. screen, and now here it is mimicking humanity—like it does best.

John's thumb is still inside its wound while the Terminator speaks. Its voice vibrates up through its face like an organ, and all of a sudden John feels so _uncomfortable_ with it, with everything. His muscles tighten and his guts are swimming around, drowning, so he pulls his thumb out of its eye socket, trailing it down its cheek almost the way a tear would drip.

John pauses for a moment, wondering if he ended up proving that point he set out to prove.

Maybe, hopefully, yes.

The cool metal is still on his mind, and his voice cracks when he asks it to put him down. The Terminator obeys him. And it's still not gentle about it, either, because it has no reason to be.

He fists his hands after putting the Terminator's jacket back on, still brewing in that feeling from before, the one that doesn't have a name. That rocked him to his core. But it's time to leave, and they do, and neither of them say a word about what just happened in that bathroom.

John tells it to take him anywhere.

He doesn't know how it decides something so open-ended, but after a minute of calculations John couldn't even begin to understand—it does. They ride all night to put distance between them and the last place they were sighted, the diner where John ate eggs and toast and skipped out on the bill. He keeps one arm around the Terminator's waist and curls tight against its back, biting his thumbnail as the world rolls by, taking them with it. Giving them just enough scraps to live off of.

Until the world decides to be generous.

While they ride through this quiet, suburban neighborhood trying to reach another hole-in-the-wall motel, John sees a family of four in their driveway with the trunk of their Jeep open, loading what looks like a whole campground into the back of it. John digs his fingers into the Terminator's side and says, "Hey, slow down a little. Pull over by that tree."

The two of them watch the family finish and eventually zip out of their driveway and leave, and then he looks at the Terminator while it looks back at him, and John makes an executive decision.

Breaking and entering isn't so bad. It isn't like they've been squeaky clean until this very moment—they've broken enough laws that it'd be easier to write a new one that just says, _anything that involves John Connor and his Terminator._ This falls into that category.

So does stealing, John thinks, but he won't steal anything they'll miss, and when they come home they won't even know a kid and his killing machine set up here for the whole week—other than the broken back window. He'll leave behind a note, then. _Sorry,_ and _thanks._

John spends the first half hour looting for those exact forgettable things: an extra toothbrush, a sewing kit, snack foods, new socks and clothes, twenty bucks. _Sorry_ , he thinks again. But he stops feeling sorry once he gets in their bath and scrubs himself raw, clean, and glowing for the first time in weeks. He melts into the feeling, the water. He stays in the tub long after it's gone lukewarm.

Then finally he dunks himself, and when he comes back up again the water has the faintest hint of black-grey. From his ugly hair, that cheap dye he'd grabbed from the convenience store. John rubs his scalp and looks at his palm after, and he laughs at the murky sheen it leaves, because what the hell else is there to do but laugh?

He's too content to care, might even be happy. Or as close as close to happy as he's ever gonna get—considering.

And he's thinking about the way the Terminator touched him, again.

He can't stop himself from it. He's still thinking about it once he's all dressed and his hair is just barely damp, and he picks the master bedroom to sleep in while the Terminator follows him in, loyal, protective, shotgun slung over its shoulder. The memory keeps swirling around in his head—the way it'd cut his hair. The way it was so deliberate about it, touching _John Connor._

Touching the boy whose name runs through its body like blood.

He watches the Terminator from the bed. He's laying on top of the blankets in this house that should be so perfect, but somehow manages to feel more uncomfortable than a ratty, old motel does—or even the back of a motorcycle. It's too stable for him, that's what it is. John is used to expending all his energy trying to keep himself on his own two feet, so he doesn't know what to do with stability. It frees up too much space in his head. And where other boys might use it to think about video games or paintball tournaments or whatever the hell else John did before his doomsday came, here he is thinking about how he touched the Terminator, too.

Thinking until he goes crazy.

"C'mere for a second," John tells it, after a long time just simply staring. He keeps his cheek pressed into the pillow, watching the Terminator come to him. Watching it listen. The shotgun is still in its hand pointing downward toward the carpet. John has butterflies, looking at it. How familiar it all is to him.

Except he's nervous in spite of it. His breath is so heavy he has to force it back out, when he gulps, when he tells it all at once, "Lie on the bed."

The Terminator quietly does what he says, following his order—shotgun forgotten on the floor—and doing nothing more than just simply _lying._ It's stiff on its back, looking up at the ceiling. John wiggles closer and then curls his arms around its bicep, squeezing it. Holding it. Just like on the motorcycle, he thinks. It's always easiest to sleep when he's against a machine.

That's all it is: a machine. John reminded himself when he touched its eye in that dirty gas station bathroom, and now he does it again in this comfortable bed that doesn't belong to him while he lies next to it. Because he can; it's his property. Because he _wants_ to. He gravitates towards the things that scream _monster,_ and has ever since he watched the T-1000 melt away while the T-800 held John against its side, like an accessory to his own future.

The Terminator is still while John traces the rim of its concave wound, again. He likes it too much—the chill of the metal and how his finger curls inside this thing built to be so dangerous, built by humans to destroy each other, and everything about it is designed to kill, to hunt, to terminate. It's an apex predator. But never dangerous to him. John's lucky enough to be the the rule written right into its code, and unlucky enough to have a reason to be.

He's tapping his nail against the Terminator's eyeball when it finally decides to speak.

"What purpose does this serve?" It asks. The Terminator must think it's missing something important. And this _is_ important, or at least to John, somehow. Someway. Like he could ever find the words for it, this feeling in his stomach, the way it churns around, the way it consumes him how an apocalypse spreads out and eats the world inch by inch, three-hundred and sixty degrees.

He pulls his hand back a little and presses his mouth into a thin line, thinking about it. Too much.

"I can't-... You wouldn't get it. It doesn't mean anything."

It has no answer to that, which is almost worse than anything it could've said.

And then's John's mouth is open again and he has no part in it.

"You could- you can try, if you want to know."

His heart beats faster. He doesn't know why he told it that, why in the world he offered a choice that's too human for it to even understand. The Terminator looks at him, no comprehension, and he wants to fucking kick himself. He wants his head to stop spinning.

He wants-

 _"Touch_ me," John says, grabbing at its wrist, putting its hand against the side of his face. "C'mon, same way I touched you, right here." And it _does,_ because it's already on his skin while he gives the order, and that combined with his voice must be enough to overload its whole chip with obedience—too much _John_ for it to do anything else but this. Touch him. And he told it to touch him _the same way_ but how could it possibly do that, emulate the exact way that John explored it, free-thinking, no objective other than to put his hands on it and know that he's the only one who can. The Terminator can't be like John. So it's not the same way, it's something else, something so absolutely foreign to him.

John shivers when it moves along the curve of his small face, reaching his eye and pulling down his bottom lid, looking in. _Examining._ Like a doctor would, except it already knows he isn't sick so everything it does serves another purpose, or no purpose at all.

He doesn't hate it, he thinks.

Maybe John never hated it—the sensation of being touched by his machine—even though before it'd crawled underneath his skin and made him think that he did, fucking convinced him of it, that it was wrong; that he was going against nature, going against himself. Thinking that maybe he isn't the same John Connor who saw a Terminator in a shrunken, white hallway and thought _monster,_ because now just one year later he's lying here thinking _mine._ And the Terminator _is_ his, if he remembers everything that led to this moment; all the pasts, all the futures. This one, single in-between.

It's _his_. It's destiny wrapped in a worn, leather jacket, one that John burrows himself in more often than he'd admit.

The Terminator is stroking the top of John's cheekbone, still trying to figure out the purpose of humans touching each other when it isn't to make a kid. When it's a kid doing the touching in the first place.

John's breathing so fast, now—and why the hell can't he calm down, it's going to think he's hyperventilating and then it'll stop, try to figure out why, but he doesn't want it to stop. He'd be crippled if it did.

He needs to calm down. He takes a long, tortured breath and looks somewhere other than the hole in its face, because maybe that's part of the problem; how interested John is in it. How interested the Terminator is in him.

It runs its finger along his eyelashes like someone might rub the ring of petals around a flower, and John's chills turn full-body, seizing him. Taking him by force. He understands it so clearly now, in its face and in its hands, that the Terminator has its own sort of childlike wonder that it explores him with. Curiosity by another name. It sticks to a process, and it's not fluid motion like John knows it to be, but it's there.

It's there.

"You're crying," the Terminator suddenly observes. John hadn't even realized until it said something about it.

"'Cause you're messin' with my eye." John wipes the sheets against it, soaking up all the evidence. It pulls its hand away when he says it, too, probably because the last thing it wants to do is _mess_ with John Connor—to _go crazy_ with him.

But then he feels it shift its weight away from him, and John nearly chokes.

"Wait," he says. "Don't get up. I just-"

He never ends up finishing that thought. It's enough of an order that the Terminator stays in the bed with him, and John finds himself pressed against its side all night, wondering if he's accidentally done something so stupid that he'll never live it down. Wondering if the future can change even when no one's dying, and if John's changing it right now by doing this: holding a Terminator to sleep and kick-starting his own butterfly effect, where everything will keep compounding until eventually he isn't the same John Connor who's supposed to rise up against the machines.

But then again—probably not. Because if it'd changed, he'd know it already.

Maybe he wouldn't even exist at all.

They stay four days in total.

And in those days, those nights, John makes another executive decision not to tempt fate anymore, because he should know by now how unkindly it treats him.

But fate isn't done tempting him.

The fifth morning is when John realizes they waited too long to leave. Except, it only happens when men from the government show up on their doorstep, telling John Connor to give himself up. Ordering him to. It sinks in all of a sudden that it's _his_ fault they're here. He wasn't perfect, no matter how careful he tried to be. John is still human, and he makes mistakes, and he needs to eat in diners, and he let their motorcycle sit in the street all week, and god, he's a _kid._

He feels like one when he nearly wets himself looking at all the people who've come for him, realizing who they are when they start shooting. Their weapons look different this time, sound so _different._ They're designed to hurt a Terminator.

They're able to kill one. John knows it in his bones when he sees a bullet tear into the T-800, through its jacket, through its skin, and then even through its metal skeleton instead of bouncing off like bullets have always done before. John is _worried_ for the Terminator the very first time, which is such a strange, powerful feeling that it grips him and doesn't let go. He shouldn't be scared for his machine. That isn't how this _works._

His voice cracks, "We gotta go, _now."_

The Terminator doesn't wait for John to find his own two feet. It scoops him up in its arms and escapes with him the first sign of a break in the firefight, when the men realize how many have been wounded and stop to assess the damage, and their plan—whatever the hell they planned to do with him if he did give himself up.

They can't let these men find their feet, too. With inhuman speed, the Terminator pulls John tight to its chest, protecting him and breaking through the wall of the house sideways to carve out its own escape route away from them—and then it's running with him, faster than any car. Wind howling through the bullet holes in its metal body, like it's become this instrument of horror with them. But John can barely even hear it. His ears are ringing from the gunshots, from the shells hitting the concrete, that _ting ting ting_ that made John flinch rapid-fire until those flinches forgot how to stop, where even now, he's so tense he's become like stone.

John closes his eyes and decides, he doesn't want to think about anything, or feel anything, and so he curls himself in a ball against the Terminator in last resort.

It responds by holding him even tighter.

It responds by protecting him, like it always has. Always will.

Eventually they have to stop moving. John only knows they're safe—however temporarily—when he feels the sun leave his skin and the temperature drops ten degrees, which means they're in a building. Somewhere that's long been abandoned, with scraps and dust on the floor and every window boarded-up from the inside-out, except for one, which the Terminator decides to set John down underneath of. _Gently._ Or so wounded that it has to be slow about it, anyway.

He only realizes afterward how much he was relying on that touch, how much he didn't want to be separate from it, but it's too late to say something, now. He'd just feel like a kid again. Arms raised up; asking to be held. To be loved. To be protected.

The first coherent thought he has is that they'll need to find a new motorcycle.

And a new shotgun.

But probably, not a house.

The Terminator sits down next to him. It'd spent the last two minutes craning its neck and examining every inch of the place, and John can only imagine what all had flashed behind its eyes, all the data it collected, meaningless to him. Or what stage it's in now with the _keep John alive_ protocol.

His breath catches in his throat when he watches it pull up its t-shirt—because, wasn't it white before, not red like it is now, god, he can't even think—and he sees the damage underneath. Remembers why he was so scared before, how it'd rattled him like nothing else, and that fear comes back like something visceral. He scoots forward and reaches out his hands like he means to stop the bleeding, even when the wounds are machine-deep.

"Shit," he tries to keep his voice down. "What can I do? Is it bad? Shit, _shit,_ please don't tell me it's bad."

"It is not bad," it replies, evenly. "I can regenerate skin if the wound is closed." John knows this. He's seen so many of the Terminator's cuts and scrapes and bullet wounds heal—or whatever _heal_ means, in the context of synthetic skin and copycat blood. But it also said nothing about the damage underneath. John can only hope it didn't mention it for a reason, and that it means it's okay— _operational._

John's eyes suddenly widen.

"I got a sewing kit, in my backpack. I-" He rips it off his back and empties it onto the floor along with everything else, grabbing the kit like he's a doctor rushing to the ER and not some kid who's never even threaded a needle. But he still says, "I'll do it."

He's stubborn about it, too. Payback for making the Terminator cut his hair—like they'll be even after he does this. Something it doesn't need him to do. And it just got done saving his fucking life again, so really, there's no escape from feeling like he owes the thing. It never ends. It goes in circles; time-loops.

John's looking at it and realizing that he could've died, back there, and that he still might, and that one day he _will_ and it'll be a machine standing over his body—whether or not it's the one he's crying over right now. Is that all there is, then? Fight, live, die anyway. Die like it meant nothing all along.

John sits on the floor in-between its legs and thinks, he's not going to let his Terminator die.

He writes it into his code, and then it's part of John's core directive. His humanity. His heart.

The Terminator loses its shirt and leans back, letting him have all the light from that one, uncovered window to work in. John doesn't know how to suture. He doesn't want to ask it how, either, he teaches himself as he goes along with his eyebrows knit together like he's always done, like he did when he was learning the T-800 in those early months. Like he did even before everything went haywire, fucking around with spare parts from the junkyard in his garage.

So he trusts himself to do this. The Terminator doesn't trust him back in the way he thinks of trust, but it's there, somewhere, understanding that John won't hurt it. Because if he did, the Terminator couldn't turn around and protect him.

John bites his lip and scoots close to it. Its knees are bent on either side of him, legs spread, accommodating him, curving its whole existence around John Connor like any other day. He feels funny. And he feels scared for it, still, but now there's another layer on top where he's afraid of _why_ he's scared. Why he cares so much that he'd promised to take care of a Terminator like it takes care of him.

John makes good on his promise, though. He stitches it back together with his two own hands, unsteady, amateur, so small and inexperienced. It takes him a while and they're both silent the whole time, which would be fine if John didn't still feel so funny, like something's brewing deep down inside him and has been since 1995. It doesn't boil over but it doesn't go away, either. He's stuck with it. John threads his way up from its hip, bubbling on the inside, connecting the fake skin together again. It's like a puzzle, which is something he's always been good at—thinking things through. Not making a fool of himself.

He knows the Terminator is watching him every step of the way. That it sees how crude John's work is, all these uneven stitches—asymmetrical—and how he's pulling too tight, not tight enough, taking too much skin. The Terminator doesn't say a word about it, just lets him go. Lets him ride. He ties a knot at the very end right below the thing's sternum, and then wipes the remaining blood away with an extra shirt that'd tumbled out of his backpack.

John almost comments on the nasty-looking product of all his efforts, but thinks better of it. He knows exactly what would happen because it—sort of—already did.

_"It looks stupid."_

_"Injuries can't be stupid, and neither is anything John Connor does."_

John starts pouting about it, how he can't say a damn thing to the Terminator anymore without it chewing his words up with its iron teeth and spitting them back out again. Making him choke.

But even more than that, he's _warm_. Warm everywhere; top to bottom, on his cheeks, along the wings of his collarbones, and then _low._ Lower than he's ever felt before. Down below his waist.

John presses his thighs together and stares at the ugly wound he'd fixed, not wanting to look at the Terminator's face, how it's looking back at him. Not wanting to see its right eye that John is so fucking infatuated with. He can barely stand it—being this close.

He sees the holes, too, now that he'd wiped the area clean. Bullets it took for John even though it must've known they were different, that they could pierce through its torso for the first time. It bore them anyway. Four of them. John's hand is reaching out before he even has a say in it, in what he wants, what he doesn't, and whether or not he should still be wondering if he's doing something _wrong._

His thighs squeeze tighter together. John traces the clean, circular wound where the bullet had entered, into its stomach where guts should be that instead holds circuits and motherboards, and now this hole. It feels gruesome. It feels wet, and cold, and just as wrong as he was afraid of, but here he is, poking the tip of his little finger into it. Exploring. Letting it swallow him as he pushes it in—further than he meant to—sliding it all the way to his knuckle as he feels his own guts squirm in empathy.

"Guess they can hurt us, now," John whispers between breaths. Before, people could only hurt him.

"It does not hurt," it reminds him. "The bullets did not damage anything essential." And god—it talks like nothing is wrong with this picture, like John's finger isn't deep down in a bullet wound tracing the metal he could never reach, because he wants to _know._ He wants to know everything. It was just an urge before—that _brewing_ feeling—but now it feels like a necessity. To learn the Terminator in ways he couldn't dream of when he was still working out if it was a monster or not.

There's something about coming to terms with how he trusts it. It saved his life from the beginning—and then saved it again, and again, and it's still saving him right now while he's touching its insides. The whole thing makes his chest whirl; the impossibility, the way he needs it. His heart pumps for two. _Not love_ , John thinks. There's no such thing as loving a machine so intertwined with the death of his mother or the end of his fucking world.

He idolizes it, then. Because of how it lives for him.

He finds another bullet hole—dead-center of its chest—and pushes his forefinger all the way inside. He gasps while he does it, feeling how it divides itself up into layers. A skin-deep human with metal on the inside. It gives him goosebumps, thinking about it, how dangerous it should be. How instead he's domesticated it.

John looks up at the Terminator, finally, with his pink cheeks, and his sweaty skin, because now he's wondering what on earth he's doing and why the Terminator is letting him.

The way it looks back at him—that exposed eye—John can feel the exact moment he turns liquid.

His body moves on its own, then. He's dizzy and confused as he shifts himself over its thigh, straddling it, trembling in his knees because—fuck—he doesn't know what this _is._ What he feels. He has no program to follow, he's just a kid in all this, a boy with a robot that'd let him do anything as long as he didn't hurt himself doing it.

And maybe he only feels like this because of what happened today. Knowing that his Terminator could've died and that John could've been taken away from it, and the prospect of either of those things is somehow worse than the whole of the world ending. The adrenaline is pumping through him now and it's enough to make his muscles ache. His body still wants him to fight, and it's begging him to, even when there's nothing left to fight against, to fight for. It's just him and his Terminator, now.

_We._

His nails dig into its chest while his finger stays buried. "Please," John says. He doesn't know what he wants, what he's even pleading for. "C'mon, please. _Fuck,_ I-."

And then he's moving, rocking himself on the Terminator's thigh with his knees braced against the floor—his heart swelling, his insides still liquid—and it's everything. It means everything. John chases friction and lets it have its way with him. He can barely breathe, thinking about how the Terminator is allowing John to do it, _this_ , whatever it must look like to the T-800 while it observes him rolling his hips and throwing his head back. Like he's someone else. Like he isn't John Connor. But it must be processing _something,_ in how it watches him _._ It's learning this new, unexplored thing through the same lens it's always used: Keep John alive—keep John happy—let John do as he pleases.

So John does whatever makes him feel whole, again.

It doesn't touch him, because he doesn't ask it to.

John's whole body is pressed against it by the end as he shivers through his bones, quaking like he's dying, when really he feels alive for the first time in two years. These little noises make themselves known, bubbling up in his throat. He's _mewling._ He feels changed. He feels like he's tempting fate again, like it's become this cosmic game to him, biting into the past and present and future until finally they all release their jaws from him.

The words spill out of him as he breathes. "I don't wanna go back out there, I don't wanna be _alone."_

John mouths it right against the Terminator's throat, speaking into its skin. It listens to him, because it's been programmed to him, to the tune of his voice, his name, his very _blood._ All it knows in this world is John.

It'll follow him until the end comes knocking, but until that happens—and right now, holding John while he trembles away—the Terminator looks down at him. Does nothing but obey the two commands he'd given.

They don't go back out there. At least not until the morning comes, and John remembers why he's so damned special, why he needs to _live._

And John Connor is not alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope someone out there was looking for fanfic of them like I was, and that this feeds you nicely <3
> 
> Forgive me if I got any lore wrong LOL I was going from memory and like to play loose with things anyway.


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